There's been a lot of conversation in the body positive space about public "health journeys," and the potential harm influencers can do when they aren't careful about their words.

There's a lot of "their body, their choice" rhetoric popping up again.

So let's talk about it.

A disclaimer, I still have size privilege and while my eating disorder history has resulted in a lot of weight cycling for me, I carry some amount of privilege regardless.

So I'm going to speak specifically as someone with an eating disorder, impacted by diet culture.

The context: A very visible body positive influencer recently discussed her health journey, as someone with a chronic condition that limited her mobility and caused her pain.

This video has been upsetting to a lot of folks within body positive and fat liberation spaces.

The reasons WHY people are upset are being misrepresented, though.

No one's saying that this influencer can't pursue health-promoting behaviors that are specific to her condition and her needs.

It's the framing, the language, and the audience that aren't landing.

One of the big pitfalls we see when influencers share their "journeys" is the continued moralizing of food. Good foods, bad foods, or trying to obscure their intentions by saying "special occasion foods" or "celebratory foods."

Diet culture benefits from moralizing food. Human beings don't.

We can talk about food in neutral terms! Without shaming or prescribing a certain relationship to different types of food. It can be harmful, though, to suggest some foods are inherently good or bad.

"I wasn't eating the variety of foods that my body needs" lands differently than "I was eating bad foods that I shouldn't have been eating."

In both cases, you're talking about needing to expand your food options. But the latter suggests a correct and "right" way of doing so.

For folks with eating disorders, fat folks who have been shamed for their food choices, and anyone negatively impacted by diet culture, moralizing food can lead to disordered behaviors that are NOT in tune with what's good for our bodies AND our brains.

Further, it perpetuates a culture of shame around eating, and the false idea that what we eat has the biggest impact on our health. In reality, health is much more complex — it's a constellation of genetic, environmental, emotional, physiological, and social factors.

So when we ask influencers to use their words in a responsible way — one that doesn't attach shame or moral judgments to food choices — it's not about silencing them. It's asking them to consider the contribution they're making in this larger conversation.

It requires intention, yes. But so does recording, editing, uploading, and marketing your videos online, you know? The extra step means reducing the harm that comes with perpetuating a culture that makes people feel like shit about nourishing themselves.

When your primary audience is people likely to be struggling with their bodies and their relationship to food, or people who are trying to educate themselves on that experience, it's worthwhile to consider how our telling of our own stories might still uphold harmful narratives.

Widening that lens for a minute, framing health itself as a moral imperative — even if you're just speaking to your own experience — is questionable.

"I gave up on my health and by doing so, I gave up on myself" is a very common narrative in fitness communities and it absolutely sucks, especially because it carries the assumption that fat people are helpless, irresponsible, unmotivated, lazy, etc etc.

Again, there's a difference:

"I realized that I needed to pay more attention to the role movement plays in my life, and by doing so, I saw where I'd disconnected from my body's needs"

versus

"I stopped caring about myself and I let myself go"

There's a difference between "I rediscovered movement as a way to alleviate my chronic pain" and "I didn't care about myself before but look! Now I do, because I'm exercising just like the normies do!"

The subtext, which I'm attempting to pull out here, is the difference between upholding and challenging diet culture. A culture which suggests that food restriction, regimented exercise, and a small body size are the fundamentals of health, when they so clearly are not.